November 12, 2005

Astrology in Science Daily

I'm surprised to see your Science Daily site has a horoscope page. I've written about astrology a few times: surely you know that astrology is made-up pseudoscience that fails every scientific test? It's already hard to get people to understand what science is, and how it is different from pseudoscience. Aren't you making this job more difficult by encouraging belief that astrology somehow belongs in a scientific publication? I'm assuming you can't seriously believe astrology is anything but nonsense.

I'd be interested to know why you have an astrology page, and if you would consider removing it from your scientific journal.

He replied:

I hear you -- and the dozens of others who have written to me about this recently -- and I'll remove the astrology items from ScienceDaily immediately.

What happened was that we recently licensed a commercial newsfeed from UPI -- not just their science news, but everything -- general news, science, business, sports, entertainment, you name it. I thought that would be OK to offer our readers, even if not all of the content was necessarily science-related. However, I didn't realize that the "Quirks" feed in particular included horoscopes.

Having said that, I realize that astrology is particularly offensive to a large number of our readers, and so I'll work to explicitly exclude anything to do with astrology in the scripts we use to display the UPI feeds on ScienceDaily.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks Dan. I can easily understand how something like this can slip in under the radar. Kudos to Dan and Science Daily for recognizing the error and offering to correct it.